In a recent blog post, seed stage VC fund Founder Collective does a great job of visually demonstrating exactly this. Rather than call them trends, they call them themes. But the message is the same.

As Founder Collective shows in the charts below which depict interest over time as measured by Google search volume, the leading companies in areas like crowdfunding, virtual reality, the sharing economy, 3-D printers, and deep learning and machine learning were created well before those areas became trendy.